The New Client

The uncle's viewpoint:

A walk with my family into a new mall. I hear an excited shriek from my nephew as he points to the latest Drone available at the local toystore. It's the end of the month, hence finances are slightly tight.

I smile, put in an order to sell some shares. The next second, I get the amount credited into my account and walk in to the store to make the payment.

The nephew's viewpoint:

I walk into the new mall with my family. I am wearing the cool augmented reality glasses we were given at the door. When I turn to the toystore, I see the new Phantom X drone flying around in front of me. I take the glasses off, its just a photograph. Put the glasses back on and I can again see the drone, I can even touch it and play with it. I quickly turn to my uncle with a pleading expression.

The Toy shop's Viewpoint:

We signed an agreement with the drone maker that once we sell 100 units of his products we will receive an additional commission of 10000 USD. To entice customers we used augmented reality to get them into a store. We just sold the 100th unit. I am about to enter it into the system.

And Voila, instantly the Smart contract gets executed and I receive 10000 USD into my account.

The Tech :

This future is not a very far off future. AI, Augmented Reality and Blockchain are the future of all sales and financial transactions.

Marketing of products will soon be more tech based and interactive with Augmented reality allowing a demo of the product at a very low price to the user thus enabling him/her to make an easier decision. Knowing this, the quality of the product will need to be high as well.

Transactions will be over the blockchain. No more needing to wait T+2 days for your demat account to get reflected. We might even never have to file taxes again. A smart contract gets auto executed with the government at the end of each financial year and taxes paid automatically.

My take on the Fallacies of this tech:

In Ayn Rand's " Atlas Shrugged " , there was a scene where the two characters, Fransico D'Antonia and James Taggart have the following Conversation .

" There are many reasons why people would not want to disclose their income Fransisco"

" There are only two reasons James. One, you don't want people to know how rich you are and two, you don't want them to know how you got that way" .

I find this passage very relevant to this discussion. As the future of consumers moves further and further towards tech, the obvious issues will be with the availability of data to this tech. Already the AADHAR card has recieved a lot of critiques regarding privacy of user data. It does also have its benefits with a number of government welfare schemes now being directly credited to user accounts.

For AI to be effective, it will require access to our likes, dislikes, our opinions on matters as well as our medical records. For eg: Imagine a patient prone to seizures. the mall in the above example may detect the prescence of this patient in it's vicinity and monitor him/her as they move through the mall, ready to call a doctor as soon as it detects any anomalies.

Blockchain by itself is impressive in the manner it maintains anonymity through its HASH protocols for encryption as well as storage of data across multiple nodes. Pretty much as close as possible to a unhackable system. However, how comfortable will you and I be, with allowing this level of access to our personal life?